Oddly, it was a wrench—until she remembered what he had done to Charles, what he had so casually tried to do to her. “It wasn’t blue,” said Sarah, staring at him across three feet of tingling space, “it was green. You saw it the other day when you got my raincoat out of the closet, and you still thought it was blue. You’re colorblind, aren’t you, Hunter? That’s why you got mixed up between my suitcase and Bess’s the first night I was here and you came for the train ticket, that’s why you put that blob of green paint on the background of Milo’s portrait. Did you—” her voice broke without warning “—hold the blue curtain out to Charles as he was going over the—over the—”
Evelyn screamed and ran scuttlingly; she gasped over her shoulder, “Bess, the Silver’s out!”
Long John came steadily forward. He was of a bad-tempered breed at best, and age had not improved his disposition. The pain of his broken spur, the memory of having been slashed at in an enclosed place, had wiped out any hesitation before the light and the collection of legs and faces. He had been cunningly silent when he commenced his stalk—now he was uttering his peculiar challenge, half-cry, half-grunt.
Rob stepped back, and jerked Kate with him. Bess stood with the rigidity of iron; so did Hunter although he looked suddenly ill. Evelyn was crouched in the far corner of the barn; Sarah turned in the hard circle of Harry Brendan’s arm and saw the Silver’s powerful snowy wings stretch to an incredible span.
“Bess,” said Milo in a mounting voice, “get this damned bird—”
“No,” said Bess in a voice as still and unflinching as her pose, and the Silver launched himself at Milo.
It was a frightful thing to watch. Deprived of the stick, of any weapon at all, Milo was caught in a primitive terror of the beating wings, the seeking claws, the furious beak. He ran blindly across the barn, and the Silver, infected by frenzy, plummeted at his back. Blood from the reopened wound made a streak of red on the foulard, more vivid than dye, and drove the cock to fresh fury.
Milo held an arm across his eyes, but he did not cry out again. It was Harry Brendan who said tensely, “Oh my God,” and walked across the barn fast and snatched the long-handled, metal-rimmed net from its position on the wall. As the Silver flew at Milo’s shining, maddeningly glassed-in eyes, he flung the net. It fell with a clatter, striking one snowy black-veined feather, but it did not deflect the Silver for an instant; if anything it accentuated his rage. The crimson face turned only glancingly, the coarse brilliantly black crest seemed to stand even more erect. Harry threw the net again, and the cock launched himself into a strong web of nylon.
There was silence, and then a thrashing and a sound of breaking feathers. Cut in two places, Sarah nevertheless turned away; she could not bear to look at the beautiful vicious strength tattering itself inside the net.
Milo patted his pocket for a handkerchief, found none, and wiped his face with his sleeve. He said pantingly to Bess, “You won’t—have him long—I promise you. There was sleeping sickness—last year—and pheasants are carriers—and this is the end of yours.”
“Where is the diary?” said Bess. She would, thought Sarah with distant amazement, have been just as stony with Hunter. For all her poses—her battered clothes by day, her stark elegant black after six—she was a woman without compromise in any direction.
“You know,” said Milo, fumbling at his glasses, sliding them down in a painful parody of his old mocking way, “that diary is better unfound. You don’t show up in it terribly well, Bess, and Edward’s made a total fool of. Charles looks like an idiot, but a dangerous one. Harry had his eye on her, and Hunter used to meet her out in the hut—”
“To go digging ferns. Edward thought she found them by herself,” said Hunter, but he had flushed darkly, as though at the realization of Nina’s secret amusement. “God . . . I told you about that business on the bluff, because I said we ought to have the woods posted in case children should wander in . . .”
Long John crouched quietly in the net, guarding his plumage. Bess, her face bitter, put on her leather gloves and bent swiftly, pinning the strong wings and picking up the netted bundle so that the metal handle trailed on the barn floor. She said quietly, “Do you know, I’ve half a mind to let him out again,” and for a nightmarish second it seemed possible that she would.
Harry Brendan said between his teeth, “You’re being too modest, Milo. Surely you crop up somewhere in the diary? What does Nina have to say about you?”
Milo’s face glittered, otherwise he might not have heard. He said in a voice that went high with triumph, “She wasn’t Rob’s cousin at all. Oh, far from it. She was his—”
Given a chalk, thought Sarah, he would have enjoyed writing obscenities on walls. Something, Rob’s step forward or the fact that Bess still held the Silver cock and had turned, stopped him.
“Old flame,” said Bess with an urbanity that gave Sarah a wild impulse to laughter. The impulse died when the very tail of her eye caught the look of total shock on Kate Clemence’s face. Obviously Kate had accepted the tale of cousinship, and had put Nina Trafton down as a necessary evil when Charles was so innocently dazzled by her. And that, of course, was the reason behind Rob’s hostility toward Sarah and any investigation of Nina. Kate was not going to forgive him easily or quickly for having introduced the woman who was, in a sense, the cause of Charles’s destruction.
“Nina had only enough money for
